


Hunter Treader

by speckledsolanaceae



Series: The Art of Entanglement [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Bloodplay, Demons, Graphic Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Trope: Supporting the Monster Loved One, Trope: Who You Gonna Call?, insignificant character death, pro-demon propaganda, softcore vore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:13:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23572915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: It starts in the dark, but not for long.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Series: The Art of Entanglement [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1696780
Comments: 30
Kudos: 210
Collections: NCT Spookfest Spring Scream





	Hunter Treader

**Author's Note:**

> Prequel work need not be read! It will contribute and enlighten, but this stands alone just fine I think.  
> On the other hand, if you came here from Purple Green, this is a slightly different speed, but I think (HOPE) you will enjoy it nonetheless!
> 
> Please take note: this is for spookfest, but it most likely won't haunt your sleep unless you are sensitive to violence, which is why the archive warning is there. If you are at _any_ point uncomfortable and no longer enjoying yourself, I beg you to stop reading and close the tab. Your safety is more important.
> 
> Otherwise, please enjoy! ♡

There’s the sound of someone fighting for breath in the pitch, sudden—of sweet human lungs pressing up against bars of ribbing like a tongue against lined paper.

_Where are you? I can feel you. Where are you?_

Skin touches the stone floor, long, sweeping gestures. A bony palm skimming the linoleum, fingers scratching the seams. They’re on their knees trying to find him. Scoping out the ground, blind, three arms-lengths away. The fabric of their pants muffles the ridges of their legs.

He is curled up, spilling under his own grip, drooling himself out at the incisions and sutures.

_I won’t hurt you. I promise._

They get closer. He presses himself to the wall of the raised cubby, heat pooling behind his nose and pressing up into his eyes.

_Please. I followed you here. I could feel you hurting._

Their heart beats so quickly he can feel it in his mouth, in his blood. It taps against the air like an echolocator, trying to find the one in his own chest. Which he has held still. Which he will not allow to give him away.

He doesn’t know how they still get closer, knuckles hitting the wall outside and below him. He sinks into the corners of his space, seeping into the cracks, wanting to sob.

_You won’t hurt me and I won’t hurt you. You’re okay. Let me. Let me find you._

He lets out a moan of fear when their fingers lift to curl at the edge of his cubby. He can’t see them but he can feel it. Hear it. The way their fingers smooth out the edge, the wet sound of it sliding in his hurt, the crack of their knees as they pull themselves to a stand.

The sound he made was awful. He flinched at it. Attempted to diminish into the paint.

They reach out their hand and touch his heart, bare where he’s left it out in the open in his chest, and the world turns to gold.

“Mark Lee.”

He awakes with a gasp. 

Evening is slipping across his ceiling and illuming the little, structureless shapes in the texture. He can sometimes see wolves or faces and other meaningless fits of imagination up there, but his mind is too blurry with the vestiges of gold to see much of anything.

“Yes,” he croaks out.

“Are you going to tell me when you’re having nightmares, or am I going to have to guess?”

He lifts his head to look at the boy sitting on his duvet at the end of his bed, legs folded under him, chin on his fist. Donghyuck: late in the day with his too-long hair pulled away and up into a little paintbrush of a ponytail while the rest of the hair that can’t reach spills over his temples. The light brushes across his oversized college shirt and the barest slip of his purple briefs peeking out from under it.

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” Mark says.

“Sure looked like one,” says Donghyuck.

“It _wasn’t,”_ Mark says with vehemence this time, but Donghyuck doesn’t even raise his eyebrows. His lips just purse to bite back a smile. “Besides, even if it was, how am I supposed to tell you in the middle of a nightmare that I’m having one?”

“They come in bouts,” Donghyuck says simply, then lifts himself off the bed in an ungraceful display of limbs. “One nightmare leads to another, and then you’re tense for a week until they go away again.”

Mark grabs the pillow under his head and rubs his face into it.

“Were you dreaming about me, then?” Donghyuck opens up Mark’s closet like it’s his, rifling for a shirt among the darker shades. Mark’s not a very neat creature—neither of them are—but he always manages to get his clean clothes put away. It’s the dirty ones that condemn him.

There’s a pair of shorts, in fact, hanging on his footboard.

“Even my nightmares feature you, Donghyuck,” Mark mumbles, and Donghyuck makes a complaining noise and pouts, casting big eyes at him over his shoulder. It’s for show. It has to be. But uneasiness pitches a fit in his belly against his better judgment. “In a good way,” he says, vulnerable now, and Donghyuck’s eyes turn into crests of endearment.

“I was teasing you.”

Mark buries himself face-down into his pillow. He took a nap as soon as he got home, college an exhausting feat of bland intelligence when he only learned how to properly read some eleven years ago. And yet, by the grace of either his irregularity or just sheer, dumb fucking luck, he’s passing. It feels like he’s doing it by the skin of his teeth, but he is. He’s just slow.

“It’s fifteen miles away.”

Mark remains with his face in the pillow, lungs throbbing a little with impatience from not breathing, and tries to process what random coupling of words Donghyuck just threw at him. Fifteen miles away. “It.” Mark’s mind is groggy.

Fuck.

He pushes himself up all at once, sitting back on his heels, hands pressed into the slate blue duvet. “Wait, seriously? It’s _finals.”_

Donghyuck sighs, discarding his shirt and tugging on the long-sleeved under armour Mark keeps at one end of his closet. Now it makes sense. “Desperate times call for idiocy,” says Donghyuck. Now that Mark’s more properly awake, he can tell Donghyuck’s unhappy, irritation ticking in his body the way discomfort crawls through someone’s skin.

Mark pulls himself out from under the pile of sheets, rubbing his face. He almost reaches for his glasses on instinct—from sheer ritual practice alone—then doesn’t, pulling off the people clothes he’d fallen asleep in.

He can hear Donghyuck suck his bottom lip into his mouth, and Mark shoves a look of incredulity his way.

“It just never gets old,” Donghyuck says, and it would pass for defensive if he weren’t so inherently shameless.

Mark ignores him, shaking out his limbs and holding the right image in his mind for the effect he wants. Same order, same execution, his skin barely indicating a change, a second layer. It comes naturally to him, and he doesn’t really need to check himself in the mirror anymore. He does anyway, switching on the overhead light to check the details and make sure the mask covers enough of his face.

“Your fly’s down,” Donghyuck quips, and Mark frowns.

“These pants don’t have a zipper,” he says, and pinches the flap at the front of the black jeans for proof. He doesn’t need a zipper. He’s not going to take a piss in the middle of what they’re about to do.

“I’m _teasing,_ Mark Lee.” And god, _god._ He knows. He knows Donghyuck is teasing—it’s been eleven years of this quick-witted dance—but his mind always defaults anyway. He’s positive Donghyuck does this for his own sake so he doesn’t go bumbling around taking everyone’s word at the dictionary definition. He’s also positive it’s worked—it just takes him a second sometimes.

“It’s sweet,” Donghyuck says to soothe the scrunch between Mark’s eyes, voice sonorous with the compliment like it’s something great. 

It is.

“Let me get some pants on,” he continues, and hip-checks Mark before sliding back out the door and toward his own room. Mark follows because he’s already gone and done all he needs to do.

The hallway is short, but decorated with the color-by-numbers Donghyuck’s parents like to do. Any finished work, like clockwork, is sent to them both to find another nail in the wall and a new spot of painstaking detail and color. Mark feels like they’re love letters to their son. And maybe to him too.

Donghyuck resides in what was supposed to be an office, but it makes no difference since he keeps his clothes in a dresser, instead, and the bathroom’s in the hallway, unattached to any bedrooms. It’s cluttered, drawers open and puffing out errant slips of clothing. The bulletin above Donghyuck’s desk is covered with labelled envelopes, and there’s a map sprawled out against the wall facing the window covered in glass head pins and makeshift tape tags with notes on them. Across the floor are notebooks, textbooks, an old printer, a duffel bag, a backpack… Mark picks his way quietly, reaching to steady Donghyuck’s elbow as he jostles himself into a pair of dark-wash jeans.

“Joggers dirty?” Mark murmurs as Donghyuck pushes through a pile of miscellany and clothes for a cap.

“Mm. Let’s do the wash after this,” Donghyuck says. “If these get filthy…” He cocks his head with preemptive annoyance, then pulls his hair out of the tie so he can rake back his locks and situate the old bucket hat he uses for this kind of thing.

“Just don’t let them touch you.”

“They always do _anyway,_ though,” Donghyuck grouses, bending to snag the small backpack next to the door. “It’s annoying.”

Mark can’t bring himself to laugh—not given the circumstances. Donghyuck just rolls his eyes for one last, good measure, then reaches out his hand to interlock with Mark’s fingers.

“Let’s go,” he says simply, and the ground opens up beneath their feet.

* * *

They both see the ramshackle abandonment leering down at them and make twin noises of annoyance. It’s a two-story structure with cracked and broken windows, a crooked door, and an overgrown front garden. It wheezes in the wind like something sick and tired, and Mark feels a little thrum of pity.

“Typical,” Donghyuck says, and lets go of Mark’s hand to rummage for a face mask in his bag right before they hear someone scream within.

Within seconds, there’s more yelling, a slammed door, screaming, more screaming. Despite their general reluctance, they start to run, Donghyuck snagging the black loops of his mask behind his ears as he goes.

Mark is always in front in these arrangements, but Donghyuck reaches the door first, opening it for him so he can sprint “Up the stairs—they’re upstairs.” The front entrance is filled with dust and he ceases to breathe as he raises it around him, jumping up the rotted-carpet steps with Donghyuck close behind. He hardly takes in the hole in the floor in the living room or how one wall has caved in on itself. The first floor doesn’t smell like demon. Just human abandonment.

The second floor hits him in a fetid wave, and as usual, he can’t help the anger. The floor is open, covered in eaten-away lacquered wood, dirt, and dust. Broken ceiling lights, a moth-eaten mattress, a collection of beers scattered across the floor like a trail of breadcrumbs. The summoning circle is off to the right, slopped-over with a mass of mauve that makes Mark’s stomach jolt in pain as soon as he registers it. The markings are smudged on the floor in the shape of a wobbly egg, and for a moment he’s pinned by its jumble of half-assed requests, worming their way into his skin like hairline fractures.

There are so many tiny commands of stupid dumbassery that his head spins with them and the acrid smell of bleeding-out sharpie. There’s blood, too. Old from the right side, fresh from the left.

He inhales deeply, the smell of burning sap sullying his airways, and looks over.

It’s plastered itself to the wall, hugging a door, beating at the wood with great slams from its mass. Webbed to the ceiling, clinging to the floor. It looks massive like this—like flesh melting off the walls and growing only more erratic with every second. The hum it gives off in waves of screams is so high that as soon as Mark keys into it he has to blink away the empathy knockback of pain and fear and terror, shuddering with how it claws through him for a moment like nothing.

He feels Donghyuck’s hand on the small of his back and moves.

The sounds escalate, sobs beyond the smothered door morphing into pleas as Mark kneels at the edge of the summon circle. There’s chalk in his hand in the next moment, Donghyuck kneeling on the opposite edge across from him and curling his lip at the mess in front of them. Mark’s stomach lurches as he nudges the hunk of demon flesh off the summon markings. It’s still hot to the touch, sticking to his skin like a child clinging helplessly.

For a moment, he closes his eyes, throat working to swallow back bile.

He’s grounded again by the pasty sound of Donghyuck pressing his chalk to the outer rim, so soft under the swelling sounds of the demon’s duress, but there.

They work quickly, a muddy blood-brown caking his fingers until the egg-shaped monstrosity is evened out and no longer frigid to the touch. He pushes himself to his feet, stumbling back and turning to watch as the air shifts as soon as Donghyuck claps his quickly-cut hands to the ruined wood at the center of the summon.

The demon hushes.

There are several beats of choked-off silence—Mark standing at the foot of the circle and the demon reaching out to him in caution without a single physical move. Mark lets it investigate and feels the way its attention taps at his skin.

It throbs against the door, then begins to unstick itself from the ceiling, uprooting itself from the floor. Sloughed off the wall, it becomes an alert and nervous puddle, barely throbbing to the point that only Mark could possibly hear the thrum of its heart.

It's pretty in the wan twilight, a shining, rippling, watered-down purple with glittering pores. It tucks itself into a lump, only slightly bigger than an overstuffed lounge chair, and seems to cradle itself for a moment. Mark can feel its awareness continue to nudge over him and visit the rapid rise and fall of Donghyuck’s chest.

When it begins to crawl across the floor, Mark chooses to not acknowledge the trapped weeping and pleading questions inside the room the summoner fools locked themselves in. He keeps his eyes on the demon as it extends arm-like appendages, digging its grip into the floor to move itself, the wood underneath it cracking uncomfortably. It leaves residue behind it in dribbling smears of blood, and Mark’s heart aches.

“Hey,” Mark whispers when it’s near enough to stretch and touch his feet. It curls around his ankle, and a flash of sudden agony whips through him like dry ice sliding down his spine. He gasps through it, reeling, then fights down anger while it holds onto him so gently. He gets naked impressions of blood and tearing and panic and pain, and.

Sometimes.

Just sometimes. He, too, wants to kill some humans for what they’ve done.

He’s about to crouch when something in the locked room moves. He freezes, eyes on the door.

The demon stretches again, unfurling from around his pant leg where it had hugged him like a kid. There’s fear and caution in the way Mark can feel its attention leak back around the entire floor, scratching at the walls, confused and afraid.

“Hyuck—” he whispers, but the demon flinches and Mark doesn’t so much as breathe another sound.

There’s snuffling breaths coming from beyond the door, and then a heavy clunk.

Mark stares in disbelief as the doorknob turns. He wants to bend down and gather the demon in his arms, but he can’t.

All at once, the door is flung open, there’s a bloodied human girl screeching and coming straight at them with a broken table leg raised, the demon shudders once, Mark turns toward Donghyuck, the air splits.

He feels the pain first, then hears Donghyuck second—the shout of surprise, the way his sweet brown eyes go huge with alarm.

They’ll never get used to it.

He cannot imagine what nightmares Donghyuck must see behind his closed eyelids, collecting every week of their lives.

There’s a purple rod sticking right up between his ribs, right through his spine, right up against his heart.

Mark coughs once, gagging on the pain lancing through his human nerves, shock prickling through his body as every essential below the split in his spine falters and leaves him in ripples of static.

He watches Donghyuck’s gaze, in these tiny, frozen milliseconds, shift over his shoulder, then squeeze closed, and he doesn’t have to look to hear the broken breath behind him. The tiny rattle, the sound of blood hitting the floor from a distance.

“You fucking idiot,” Mark moans, and then lets himself go.

* * *

Donghyuck found out he could slip into the interplane at the unsure age of thirteen. It was blinding in there despite all the black—like sinking through miles of bogwater scented like water lilies and curiosity.

It happened entirely by accident, triggered after being grounded to his room for yelling unsavory and creative nicknames at his dad. He was crying, as thirteen-year-olds do, wishing he had different parents, as thirteen-year-olds do, and then fell right through the floor, as most thirteen-year-olds _don’t_ do.

He didn’t even have the chance to scrabble his nails at the edges of the hole in his floor. He simply fell and watched as the gap closed up, and kept falling, heart beating and the interplane in blacks and pinks and little snatches of whites beating with him, intrigued. And kept falling. Slow.

At the time, he would have struggled to explain how the interplane prodded at him without form, touching across his body in little nudges like one might a very unusual bug. He could still breathe in there, but it was difficult to focus his eyes. So he squeezed them closed and felt everything better that way.

It moved like a hive of amiable bumble bees, lazily a single unit, but certainly made up of individual things. Donghyuck _felt_ the colors, the wonder, the sort of odd “hello” they could manage in some bizarre configuration of language.

The corridors of the interplane were and are amorphous at best—with little cores of demons tromping about at windows peeking into the realplane and tapping the glass. It’s pleasant, a little sleepy, and intensely inquisitive. 

Donghyuck’s breed of human is rare. He calls himself a Treader, but really there’s very little walking to be done in the interplane. Just a lot of feeling things out. Saying hello to the mere suggestions of demons as they smell the hypothetical flowers. It’s a soup of color and feeling like the way two good-natured neighbors meet with a plate of some dessert that’s never been seen before and both parties are cautious to taste. It ends up tasting quite good, but still no one knows what’s in it.

It’s safe to say that as scared as Donghyuck was the first time, he still kind of liked it there.

When he wanted to get out, it pushed him out right up under his bed where the light didn’t touch the dust bunnies.

And, well, Donghyuck wasn’t the kind of person to wait a week to see if he could do the same thing twice.

He wished to be somewhere else, and the interplane swallowed him up all over again. The prods were excited that time, like he’d startled whatever was in there, and when he laughed in incredulity, garbled in the soundscape, the entire plane around him seized up like a toddler hearing pleasure for the first time. 

What seemed like seconds passed, and then he was—it can only be explained as such—snuggled like a cub, a delight to their endearment, sharing in his euphoria and humming back at him in warmth.

And then came the flash of pain.

It was raw, shuddering through everything like a match sputtering in the wind and setting thin strips of powder across miles aflame.

The interplane convulsed, letting out a plaintive wail, then surged to scratch at one singular window like there was something out there that hurt a part of them deeply, desperately wanting to crack the glass, the hinges, the wooden frame and bring it into its arms, but wholly unable to.

Donghyuck didn’t need to move to reach for that window. He simply extended his curiosity and fear, and through that drew closer. The nearer he got, the more acute the pain became. Tiny, horrid jumps of torture that rang through his mind and clung to his heart like a plea.

He pressed up against the glass, wanted, pushed.

And fell right into a deeper darkness than he could ever explain.

Mark was there.

In the cubby.

Barely older than fourteen, hurt and bleeding from tests and bludgeoning and cuts pressed into his skin. Donghyuck could see nothing, but the pain still trembled through the air, suddenly, violently tasting like horror and fear as if Mark could sense him and was scared of who he could be.

Donghyuck hadn’t known anything at the time except that the interplane wanted him back.

He hadn’t known that touching a demon’s core would bind them to him if the temperature, the feeling, the soul was just right—even if that demon was a fourth off from a pure-blood. Mark was part human, after all. Had a human body. Had a mixture of soul and skin and core.

But he touched him right where Mark was most vulnerable, and everything was just right. Donghyuck’s heart just the right temperature, his feeling just soft enough, his soul just wild enough, and everything dyed the color of calm navy from the inside of Donghyuck’s deepest thoughts to the feeling of his exhale past his lips, the air going from acrid to sweet and cold. 

Proceeding from there was a muddle, tangled and confused and filled with Mark’s clumsy, panicked limbs and broken-up questions as the battered boy battled a clash of fear and the innate urge to trust this suddenly-intimate stranger chained to him before he was ready. 

When he finally managed to tug Mark into the interplane, the entire place moaned with the return and smothered Donghyuck in something like careful but frantic kisses.

But the interplane had to let them go.

And Donghyuck couldn’t understand them just right, but it was clear as the color red in roses that Mark couldn’t survive with them—not for long—and suddenly Donghyuck had their blessing and a bleeding, weeping boy under his bed.

And thus, Donghyuck was given Mark.

Beautiful, curious Mark who has his body impaled like something out of a night terror. 

Black blood drips off the tip of it, slow and shivering with Mark’s fractured breaths. There’s darkness slicking down the tight shirt manifested over his stomach, too. Above his mask, Mark’s deep eyes stare into his, pupils huge with hurt.

He will never get used to it.

He will never get used to seeing Mark in pain.

Over Mark’s shoulder is the human, suspended by the gut, who spurts once and then slops, sagging, wheezing, sliding down the demon’s quill from the weight of her body. The demon is more or less the image of a sea urchin—one who lashed out in a panic, in fear, and took Mark through the spine with it. The barb wouldn’t have even come close to Donghyuck, but as usual, it is Mark between Donghyuck and danger. Always.

Donghyuck has to close his eyes, to center himself, to not cry at the very least, to remind himself that it is never his fault if another human dies, that Mark hurt is just another part of the history they’ve woven together.

He senses it when Mark lets go, hears his tremor of a swear right before it, and can feel the tiniest brush against his face like Mark is caressing his cheek with his lips before everything goes to shit.

It feels as if the room explodes.

Donghyuck is propelled backward, back hitting the far wall hard enough that his breath punches out of him and his eyes jolt open. Everything cluttering the room is blown to the very edges, then sucked in like a giant taking breath before the winds began, the pressure making Donghyuck’s ears pop, the air formulating such harsh curves in a sudden squall that every whip is nearly visible.

It would be near impossible to see anything of Mark, now, if it weren’t for the occasional streak of black blood lashing through the air and splattering across the ceiling, making Donghyuck’s nerves sing in anxiety. Under this new barrage, the demon shrinks into itself, the human girl hitting the ground with a limp roll Donghyuck can’t hear over the windstorm rising. The entire floor moans and creaks. The blood from the bleeding body splatters and whisks across the room in pink sweeps. 

Donghyuck watches, trying to catch his breath as the summoned demon flinches and warbles and retracts its spines fully under pulsations of pressure and afflictions of air. If Donghyuck squints against the detritus and dust, he can catch the tiny breaths of navy coloring in the swirls of hell being raised. The traces of Mark’s core.

He is protected from the gales that rattle the panes and rip loose glass from the sills, shredding the leaves on the ground, whispering right up next to his ear, _“There are still people in the room.”_ in a warm breath that feels like Mark is right beside him. If he reaches out, Mark would sift right through his fingers.

Donghyuck pushes himself to his feet, feeling vertigo for a moment as the ground creaks beneath him, then edges along the walls to get to the far room. He can’t hear anything over the sudden rise of the demon’s confused wails mixed with how the wind has gone from a rattling to a dull roar. It’s started to lash out, now, each swipe of a paw making Donghyuck’s stomach lurch. He needs to be faster than this.

With his eyes kept firmly on the demon, he’s able to run for it as soon Mark draws it toward the summon circle, pushing it until it follows his urging despite resisting. Donghyuck carefully avoids looking at the black blood on the floor in blown-out sprays.

When he reaches the door, it’s blocked up on the other end. He can hear the cries anew, but the door does not give under his push more than an inch. He wishes he could tear the whole thing off its hinges, but he can’t ask Mark for help and he has to act fast, so instead, he spits out a swear, closes his eyes, and drops through the floor.

It takes him three seconds maximum to land in the closed bedroom, but he ends up tripping over broken furniture piled up against the door and getting his cochleas split in two by the gaggle of idiots pressed against the farthest wall.

Their screams are utterly unintelligible, and he has to throw his arms up over his head when he gets something thrown at him in the shape of a shoe. It thuds to the ground with a pathetic _clup_ and when he glares at the boy who threw it, they only shriek louder. Fury and indignity cracks through his neck and up the back of his head.

“Shut _up!”_ he bellows back at them. “Shut the fuck up, you fucking idiots!” Before the boy can get his hand around the back of his last acid green converse, Donghyuck launches himself at all three of them, kicking back one leg of a shattered side table, and grabs that boy by the hair. The boy howls in his face as he snarls, “I’m going to _save_ you.”

And with that, the three captives go still, sour breath rising, battered and tear-stained from a demonic assault they brought upon themselves.

With a livid breath, Donghyuck drags the one by the hair to the pathetic barrier they have up. “Get rid of it _now.”_

It’s only when they all scramble, blubbering out gasps, to do as he asks that the nausea hits—and it’s not in his stomach or in his brain, but right around his heart. He almost gasps with it, almost loses his footing and gags against the floor, but he steels himself for a moment longer.

He regularly hates his own species whenever they do these jobs, but the ire is particularly strong in this hour. It’s with frustration and desperation only that he helps them, positioning himself at one arm of a heavy chair.

“Is it still out there? Is it still out there? It’s so loud,” a girl moans as she drags it with him away from the door. The dense black around her eyes runs down her cheeks, hands clenched under the ruined arm of the paisley monstrosity.

“Yes,” he says bluntly, resentful, though he can hear the strain locking up in his voice, “but if we run you’ll make it out.” The boys rush to pull away the rest of the shit at the foot of the door, and Donghyuck takes the rattling doorknob in his stinging hand.

“Who are you?” the other boy asks—the one he didn’t yank by the scruff—right as he pulls open the door. He gets a lungful of Mark in the rapid air and nearly staggers with the panic and pain of it.

“Someone who would almost rather let you die,” Donghyuck spits around the ache in his throat, blinking against the flying debris and hard whips of wind. It’s sheer willpower that disallows him from searching for Mark’s core in the cloud of brown. Instead, he steadies himself and sprints across the floor for the stairwell, not caring to look behind him, merely hoping to hell that they follow him.

It’s difficult to keep his head from spinning as he tries not to fall down the stairs, unable to use the loose handrails for jumping. With every single second passing, though, he feels his heart prickle harder, and if it weren’t for the fierceness he was making a real effort to maintain, he’d already be shaking apart.

When the shrieking of the second floor fades from around his ears and he looks around from the bottom of the stairs, he has three bodies behind him, but the girl is retching into the hands she has clawing at her face. No doubt for the husk of the person they left behind.

He spreads his arms and plants his feet as soon as they attempt to lurch past him. The one boy, hair mussed beyond immediate repair, chokes out a panicked sob at being blocked, but stands frozen with one foot on the bottom step.

Donghyuck reaches into his pocket and draws out a black card with fine gold print. He holds it out for that same boy. “Pay us for your lives or I’ll hunt you down and kill you in a way far worse than how you would have died tonight.”

He cannot explain the expression this ritual earns him from every set of tragic humans he demands this from. It’s like shock and horror folded into the finest lines of someone’s face, making them seem twice as old and all at once no older than twelve.

The boy snatches the card, and Donghyuck lowers his arms for them.

He doesn’t waste any more time: as they rush past, he immediately takes the stairs again three at once, heart panging in his chest like a hammer bending softened gold.

 _“Mark!”_ he cries before he can even breathe, flinging himself up onto the landing and tugging down his mask, and the air stills.

Every particle of dust suspends itself, going from a grey-brown swirl to silver as the moon leaks through the broken windows.

There is blood everywhere—from night-bleached crimson to mauve to a burning black. In an instant, he feels the barest brush against his lips from his demon boy, who’s so dispersed through the dust and shredded leaves that he’s entirely invisible to Donghyuck’s eyes.

A beer can totters across the floor in the vestiges of momentum.

To the right is the summoned demon, pulsing like a panicked heart only just starting to slow. Donghyuck can see the filthy air knead into it like a calming massage at the nape of someone coming down from a meltdown, swirling over its purple skin. It’s only when he blinks a few times that can he see the tell-tale navy heart of his Mark Lee.

He nearly trips over an uneven plank in the wooden floor in his hurry to reach them, but still hits the ground hard enough to bruise his knees at the edge of the summon circle.

Mark caresses his face like he’s telling him to slow down and breathe—he can feel it—and it makes his lungs shudder as he scrapes at the scabs over his palms. The summon is so close to him now that he can smell its rank fear, but it’s exhausted, now, and perhaps recognizes he is not like the others.

Donghyuck presses his bloodied fingers to the outer rim and pushes, bidding the demon a safe fall home and swift healing. Tears mix with dried blood before Mark can whisk them away from Donghyuck’s face, and the ground swallows the demon whole.

Sitting back on his heels, lungs convulsing with anxiety and tears, he swallows and aches out, “Come on,” to the silent air.

He watches as Mark puts the particles himself back together tiny piece by piece. It takes a rush of air and a trembling suggestion of form around a navy heart until the vapor condenses and becomes him again. On his knees, whole, physical, real. Donghyuck covers his mouth as Mark collapses to the side with a shudder and one arm tucked up against his abdomen, his dark eyes already locked with Donghyuck’s.

He would have put everything essential back together in the reformulation, but he can’t heal everything. Not all at once. He’s not invincible.

Donghyuck knew to expect this, but he’s worse than before. Wrestling with demons—even an injured one—to suppress a rampage is bound to hurt him. A human might swipe through him, but all demons are made from the same substance, and no amount of immateriality could dodge a lash meant to injure. The only thing Mark’s demon form lent was a leveled playing field. Just enough to make a difference.

He reaches for Mark’s face where there’s a bruise so bad it cuts right to his cheekbone, the black blood leaking into the crease of his nose as he rests his temple on the filthy ground.

“That could have gone better,” Mark says in a raw whisper, and Donghyuck chokes on a snort as he rakes Mark’s hair off his forehead. “What should we do?” Every breath Mark gives is a shudder, knuckles white as he presses his hand to the hole slitting into his abdomen. He is smart in that his clothes are entirely intact again—Donghyuck can see none of the disaster mapping his skin under them.

Donghyuck tears his gaze away from Mark with reluctance, taking in the body and the blood and wishing very much he could make it all disappear with a click of his tongue.

“Home first,” Donghyuck murmurs, and it’s a gamble, but Mark’s bleeding out in front of him.

“Okay,” Mark says, voice barely working, always so trusting, and Donghyuck shifts to hold onto him so he can carry his boy with him when he falls through the floor.

It’s easy to wish he were somewhere else.

He cradles him closely as the interplane engulfs them both, its touch sliding over Mark in worried solemnity as it does every time their little one comes back to them injured. Neither he nor Mark will ever blame the interplane and its creatures on the hurt Mark endures, even if it was at the hands of one of its own. All the blame can lay with the asses who decided to play with demonic fire.

Donghyuck allows them both to drift together for a time, letting the ache in his chest ease while Mark’s breathing smooths out and steadies against his neck. The interplane acts like a gentle life support—a stabilizer, a moment for them both to settle without rush. Mark cannot totally manage to die so long as Donghyuck is alive, but nonetheless, watching him suffer brings no joy nor peace. They almost always need the break, falling through black and lemonade yellow and spring green. The interplane hums softly around them like an electric crib, giving them space past the initial coddling.

It’s impossible to communicate properly as a human in the interplane, but the way Mark’s embrace tightens around his waist is enough for him to know they can return to their little apartment, and he’s had enough practice over the years that dropping onto Mark’s bed is an easy feat. The mattress hardly even trembles with the sudden weight, the room awash in silver highlights as Donghyuck holds Mark to his body. 

He doesn’t have a moment to appreciate home, though. There’s a warmth sticking the under armour Donghyuck is wearing to his abdomen, and out of the refuse of the abandoned house, he can smell Mark’s blood like a punch to his throat. He swallows around it, but the whine of distress that ekes out anyway has Mark pulsing his fingertips up against his spine.

“Please,” Mark whispers, and he shouldn’t have to beg like this.

With one last breath, Donghyuck carefully lifts himself off Mark’s body, then shifts down, keeping himself from brushing up against him for the inevitability of injury Mark’s still hiding from him under his second skin. Mark’s face gleams in the moonlight from the window with a sheen of sweat, and his eyes are glassier than Donghyuck needs them to be. 

He presses his lips to Mark’s mouth without further pause, tasting the salt on his upper lip as he slots into him, and Mark immediately sighs and tilts his head to meet him. Donghyuck sinks into the kiss without lowering his body, elbows on either side of Mark’s face and feeling every soft breath coming from his nose. He presses until he can taste him and the metallic hints that Donghyuck wishes weren’t there, and only then does he put himself into every bit of it—right up to the tips of his fingers and the cut of his cupid’s bow.

Mark shivers once in response to the energy he’s putting out, and when his hands press under Donghyuck’s shirt into the dip of his waist, they’re already more warm than they are clammy. His fingertips run up the ridges of Donghyuck’s ribs like he’s touching flower petals. He can feel the question Mark’s wordlessly asking.

“You first,” Donghyuck murmurs against his lips and opens his eyes when Mark’s breath hesitates against his skin. He holds his gaze, assesses the reticence in there, and hardens above Mark’s soft reluctance. “You think I haven’t seen the skin of your chest melted completely off with your ribs sticking out, Mark Lee?” he nips, and Mark winces with a shaky laugh, looking properly schooled.

When the manifested clothes melt away, worse cases or not, Donghyuck still bites his lip against a sound of pain. 

Less than two hours before, he got to see a full map of Mark’s healthy, perfect skin, lean and sweet as he shucked off his college-student clothes. Now, he’s staring at a shredded black hole the size of his fist throbbing right under Mark’s bottommost ribs. Past all the blood, he can catch snatches of a feeble, shining red, which means he repaired any ruptured organs, but _still._ There’s a horrible gash right from the hollow of his neck cutting across his left pec that shudders with Mark’s uneven breaths, and the skin of his bicep above it is utterly raw, skin sloughed off like he was shaved with a machete. Donghyuck sits up on his knees and twists to look at Mark’s legs, which reveal similar injuries, including a drooling, deep wound lashing across the tops of his thighs and an ankle bleeding so profusely it’s already melting black onto the comforter.

Donghyuck bites his lip, attempting to settle the roil of upset in his stomach while Mark tries to brush his hands across the skin of his waist in a calming manner despite the sweat on his palms.

“Can I take your shirt off now?” Mark mumbles. “I’m dying.”

Mark means it quite literally, and it’s exceptionally unfunny.

Donghyuck frowns at him, but grips the synthetic cotton at his hips and pulls it over his head, unhooking his mask and ridding himself of his hat along with it. He thinks it’s amusing that Mark judged him earlier for admiring his naked body when Donghyuck so much as shows his chest and Mark lets out a breath like someone punched him. “It’s just some skin,” Donghyuck says, narrowly managing not to be embarrassed.

“You’re beautiful,” Mark returns, unrepentant.

“God,” he says, but endures as Mark skims his calloused fingertips over his chest, thumb grazing his nipple. He hasn’t dared to strain his injured shoulder to reach him, that hand remaining steady against the dip of his waist as the rest of his body remains heavy against the pillows.

It’s interesting being with Mark, someone who has the capacity to fall in love but fails to comprehend it. They’re eleven years in and Mark’s sincerity and devotion makes Donghyuck’s heart prickle, but the word “love” seems to be so nebulous to Mark. Donghyuck has watched him avoid it, observing how he always becomes nervous and puzzled by its mappings and portrayal, unsure how to understand whatever it is he feels when he looks at his partner. Demons don’t know romance, but humans do, and Mark’s got enough humanity to outpace almost anyone. 

Still, the way Mark’s breath grows heavy just looking at him, Donghyuck thinks, is damn near close. “Settle down,” Donghyuck tells him, wincing around an endeared laugh as black blood dribbles from the wound in Mark’s abdomen and slides down his pallid skin. Donghyuck catches it with his fingers and, with a sigh, paints a heart over Mark’s solar plexus. “I love you, Mark Lee.”

Mark hiccups with the sudden pulse of emotion, twisting under his touch a little and shuddering from the affection. Donghyuck watches, fond, as the damage to Mark’s cheekbone starts to close up from just five words alone.

Mark doesn’t seem to know what he’s feeling when he looks at Donghyuck, but Donghyuck knows Mark doesn’t miss the significance of the words falling from his own tongue.

He leans down to brush his mouth against the rest of the cut on his face, feeling it seal against the sensitive nerves of his lips. He presses a wet kiss over the tender, pink skin and revels in Mark’s quick gasp. “You’re so sensitive for me,” he teases him, running a hand carefully up to circle around the back of his neck. Mark’s nape is damp with sweat, hair nearly drenched, and Donghyuck checks his fingers quickly to make sure there isn’t an abrasion. His hand comes away clean.

“That’s unfair,” Mark says after a moment, throat clicking as he swallows. He’s got his eyes locked in on him again, a little faded and pinched, but just a bit clearer. Donghyuck ducks to kiss whatever complaint he has off his mouth, tugging him in by the neck. Mark lets him suck on his bottom lip, his one hand smoothing up Donghyuck’s back to press against one shoulder blade.

Donghyuck is sure Mark can hear his heart in his ears, against his tongue, running its rhythm down his spine. But Donghyuck can feel Mark’s heart as well when he drifts away from his lips and under his jaw, feeling the flutter of his enervated but slowly-strengthening pulse. He sucks against the pained salt of his skin. Down the column of his throat. Skimming his lips against the shredded edges of skin for the gash across his chest. Until the arm keeping him up shakes for the control he’s endeavoring to maintain.

He sits up, breath uneven, and investigates the negligible difference he seems to have made in the rest of Mark’s wounds. “These are bad,” he says, frustration sliding through his veins. Kissing would lead them to hours of healing instead of just a few dozen minutes or so if he can just ramp things up a little. 

He steels himself to get off Mark if only to rid himself of the rest of his clothes. But his heart preemptively pulls so hard he almost sobs as soon as he crawls off him and to his feet. 

He’s not ready. 

Mark heaves at the sudden and dramatic loss of his skin and proximity, a strained keen tearing through his throat, spine curving in pain, and Donghyuck watches in horror as blood slops out between his ribs as he gags in distress. “Just a sec—just a second. Hold on,” Donghyuck trembles out in a near-yelp, staring and clumsy in his effort to get his pants off as fast as possible. He flings his hand out to grip the fingers clenching at the sheets as soon as he’s unbuttoned, tripping out of his jeans and struggling to get out of his underwear.

Mark flips his hand and clutches Donghyuck’s fingers so hard he feels they might bruise as Mark tries to calm his core down again. Tears slip from the corners of his eyes around panicked gasps.

And then Donghyuck is falling back atop him, one side of the duvet slick under his knee, and he kisses Mark again before his own lungs have the chance to hyperventilate.

Usually stepping away from Mark doesn’t have such a drastic effect. Which means Mark’s worse off than he’s letting on. Pain is pain. It doesn’t matter whether it’ll all go away soon. Mark’s suffering _now._

As carefully as he can, he aligns his pelvis with Mark’s and rolls his hips just to ground Mark back in the moment. It sends a shock through his own spine, and Mark chokes, tilting his chin back and effectively breaking the kiss mere moments after starting up again. The full-body shudder is scary if only because blood wells up again, but it also means things are coming back together.

There are a few things Mark doesn’t like in these conditions. He doesn’t like blowjobs or similar minimal-contact positions because then Donghyuck is only partially touching him, and sixty-nining doesn’t work well because Mark’s only ever to barely keep his head through the pain let alone suck dick. He doesn’t like Donghyuck no longer touching him because his core’s leaning too hard on Donghyuck to be suddenly left with nothing. He doesn’t like using his own blood for lubricant because it coagulates too quickly. And last of all, he doesn’t like going any faster than _slow._ Mark is a creature of foreplay, and he doesn’t take healing from lust. He takes it from affection. Intimacy. Donghyuck reaching out to him and holding their eleven-year-old bond so tightly it glows between his knuckles.

So Donghyuck goes slow and steady, rolling his hips gently in a sweet rhythm and letting himself feel openly as he watches sweat collect at Mark’s temples. As Mark puts all of his effort into overcoming the pain he’s in.

“You’re amazing,” Donghyuck tells him, putting warmth in the words and laying one hand on the gentle ridges of Mark’s ribs under his uninjured arm. With a breath, he takes his other hand and reaches down to slip it over the crown of Mark’s cock, pressing the pad of his thumb against his tightened frenulum, and Mark bites his bottom lip so hard he might end up making himself bleed. “You’re doing so great,” Donghyuck murmurs, almost mindlessly for how close he’s watching the lines of tension in Mark’s face.

It’s only when Mark flinches that Donghyuck realizes he’s leaned back against Mark’s thighs and hit the bleeding slash in his flesh. He feels heat drip down his back even as he jolts away from the contact. It’s hard to keep aware of everything between the pleasure and stress gripping a fog through his mind, but the momentary flagging of Mark’s arousal at the shock of hurt is enough to bring him back into the moment.

“You know what I’m going to have to do, right?” Donghyuck asks him as he takes both of their cocks in his hand. His grip is too small to do anything but rub over their heads with his cupped palm.

Mark’s throat works and he takes so long to answer that Donghyuck breathes in to repeat himself. “Yeah,” Mark rasps out, voice worn-over and tense. Donghyuck thumbs over his slit just to slide through his precome and watch Mark shiver.

His shoulder is slowly patching up, but Mark needs to relax. Donghyuck wishes he could ask him to move, but if a curve in his spine froths up blood, he really doesn’t want to see what happens if Mark sits up.

He gentles his grip around them both and leans up to snag Mark’s lips in his again, pushing his tongue past his teeth. Mark lets his mouth fall open for him, the tendons in his neck scintillating with sweat in the light, and gives heavy breaths through his nose while Donghyuck rubs gently over his sex and licks against the hard ridges at his palate.

Oftentimes, Donghyuck feels like he’s sliced his heart open for these sessions, pouring every inch of himself into Mark if he needs it. He knows it’s working when Mark’s attempts at kissing back become more than clumsy movements of his lips. When Donghyuck feels both of Mark’s hands in his hair, he almost hiccups with the emotion of his gentle fingertips.

Sometimes he wants to call Mark insane. Insane for the passion he spins out of Donghyuck’s soul like his love is a spindle threaded with neverending gold.

Donghyuck lies closer, pressing up against him and tangling their legs together, emboldened by every strengthened kiss he receives back. Mark kisses like there are words trapped at the back of his throat that he doesn’t know how to speak—like he only has his lips to express what he needs to say. It’s precious. Donghyuck loves him.

He breaks the kiss when he’s breathing too hard to do anything significant anymore and the struggle of stroking over their cockheads feels like one task too many on top of this. He blinks at the shine at the pit of Mark’s working throat where the blood from the gash in his chest has collected. The wound there has started to knit together, but it’s still a deep, aggravated black—not quite sealed up enough to be healing and pink. Mark’s blood runs red until it spills.

Letting go of himself so he can stroke over Mark’s shaft, Donghyuck wets his own swollen lips and lets Mark stare blurrily at him for a moment, his breath rising tightly against his injuries.

“What’s that look for?” Mark asks, but it’s so ruined they’re hardly words. Donghyuck laughs on instinct alone, the sound of him being taken by surprise and delight, and Mark flinches with the urge to join in. His eyes shine, one of Mark’s dearest compulsions being to laugh whenever anyone else does, but instead of a giggle he only coughs and gasps as the emotion ripples through his body. Donghyuck stifles himself with his fingers, watching as the sharp edge of the gash in his chest attempts to close in front of his eyes.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Donghyuck promises him.

Mark gives a huff close enough to a laugh—Donghyuck really doesn’t think getting Mark into a laughing fit is a good idea at the moment, but he can’t stop the tiny humors. “Isn’t claiming me crazy enough?” Mark says, voice still a wreck. “Tumbling through the interplane and reaching for the first demon you see.” His words are heavy with warmth, and if he keeps talking like that, he’ll make Donghyuck the wrong end of emotional.

“I’d do it again,” Donghyuck says, words easy as breathing, and leverages his hands against the duvet to push himself a little further down Mark’s body. He sees Mark’s brows pinch for a moment, unsure what’s about to happen as he loosens his soft grip in Donghyuck’s hair further, and honestly? Donghyuck feels a little unhinged when he lowers his mouth to the still-open wound on his chest and presses his tongue to the flesh and blood there.

Mark reacts like he’s been electrified, one hand falling to the mattress and hitting it with his palm as he twists under him. A groan is ripped from him like a metal beam breaking, shattered and deep. Donghyuck’s heart picks up and hammers in his ears, but he can feel the raw injury reacting to him, so he keeps going, licking from one end to the other, the metallic taste of Mark’s blood sharp and rich and wild in his senses.

He thinks it’s worth it when Mark pulls him back by the hair—insistent but still gentle—and he sees only a watered-down black against puckered pink. _“Donghyuck,”_ Mark scolds, breathless and looking at him like he was right. He _is_ crazy.

Donghyuck feels oddly drunk. He’s never really tasted Mark’s blood before. There’s something funny about it. “Are you poisonous?” Donghyuck asks, trying to wrangle his mind down from a too-sudden, prickling high.

“What?” Mark says, loosening his grip and petting his waves back from his forehead. His breath is rising harshly in his newly-healed chest, flushed up his neck under residue blood. “You think I could poison you even if I wanted to?”

It’s a fair point. It would be intrinsically counterintuitive to Mark’s biology to be dangerous to the person who is, semantics considered, his keeper. His soul-bound. Mark’s as much Donghyuck’s as Donghyuck is his. Thirteen-year-old impulsivity really snatched him the love of his life. Funny, fate was.

Donghyuck strokes over Mark’s chest, the stained, smooth skin soft against his fingertips. His painted heart still rests where he left it. Mark swallows under the attention and captures one of Donghyuck’s hands in his, pressing a kiss to the center of his palm. 

When Donghyuck slips further down his body, carefully avoiding the injuries on Mark’s thighs, Mark’s hold on his wrist gets ever so slightly tighter. “Don’t,” he intones, and Donghyuck shakes his head, free hand skimming over Mark’s waist.

“I won’t.” They can experiment with blood some other time. For now, Donghyuck just wants to kiss the raw edges of the hole in Mark’s abdomen. The skin is so hot he can feel the warmth against his lips before he even touches there. It’s burning and wet, and Mark’s muscles flinch with a whimper so harshly the welling up of blood almost touches Donghyuck’s chin. He keeps his tongue firmly behind his teeth as he drifts feather-soft kisses against the fevered, ragged skin. He can feel Mark’s cock press up against his belly in this position, watch how his fingertips knead into the patch of bloodied duvet.

When he pulls back, the effect on the actual wound is negligible—the damage is too severe—but Mark’s eyes look downright delirious. “Mark,” he sighs and does not fail to see how his gaze flicks over his lips. He doesn’t try to suppress a smirk when he licks over them, tasting the residue of being his own kind of demon.

Mark whines from deep in his throat and shifts, cock rubbing against Donghyuck’s skin and causing a domino effect that flutters in Mark’s eyelashes. “Come here, then,” Mark groans, swallowing around another furious flush creeping through his intact skin and up his neck.

“You’re kinkier than I thought,” Donghyuck croons as he carefully sits himself again on Mark’s lower stomach.

“That’s not possible,” Mark retorts quickly, and kisses the laugh off Donghyuck’s lips before he has the chance to fully engage in it. It’s fine. Kissing Mark is just as good as laughing at him. What a thrilling response, though.

Donghyuck cups his face with both hands, coaxing him back into warmth and comfort, sinking into the familiar patterns of Mark’s mouth. Slowly, Donghyuck settles his touch over Mark’s heart, feeling his own blood sing with pleasure and affection. “I’m ready when you are,” he whispers against the corner of Mark’s mouth. Mark shivers, then nods and closes his eyes as Donghyuck sits back and waits.

There’s one last thing Mark doesn’t like to do when Donghyuck helps him heal: revealing his heart too quickly.

They rarely have to do it, but even with a few experiences under their belts, it never gets less intense.

Mark’s body dissipates under Donghyuck’s thighs, drifting away from the duvet like mist escaping under his touch. Every human bit of him disappears seemingly into nothing at all, turning into wisps that curl around his legs, his waist, and brush up his chest to swirl around his heart and throat.

In Donghyuck’s hands, cupped ever so gently, is Mark’s core, glowing a soft, low navy and cool against the skin of his palms. It looks like a gentle light given form and nothing more than that, and even that isn’t a correct description. He lights nothing up except the warmth in Donghyuck’s chest, coiling affection up his throat hard enough to make him gasp behind the impulse to cry.

Demons do not lay their cores out for just anyone to hold. In the grip of the wrong person, they’d die. A crushed core is a dead demon.

Mark protects his fiercely, cleverly whenever he has to be in his full form, and it’s nearly impossible to get a solid grip on a vapor demon’s heart anyway. They’re too slippery.

He can see the way the haze around him collects in seemingly random patches, dripping feeble droplets of black. Still injured and enduring pain even in his fully relaxed manifestation.

Tendrils of sweet, soft wind caress over Donghyuck’s knuckles, and he’s crying before he can do anything more than press Mark up to his chest.

Even with what they have, he can count on his fingers the number of times Mark’s let him hold him. There is no sufficient human experience that compares to how tender it is to be holding everything Mark is in his grasp.

He places all his love into his motions as he lifts Mark up to his lips, trying desperately to calm his breath and tears as soothing threads of wind touch through his hair and over the perspiration on his skin.

With one last breath, he parts his lips and pushes his core into his mouth.

Swallowing him is like trying to harness a star. Energy rips through him until he’s blind with galaxy blues and the sizzling in his veins, nerves firing through every inch of his body. He feels like he’s unravelling and being put together all at once, the glow so deep in his chest intense enough to burn him into another life.

Love is too weak a word.

Having Mark in this way is transformative.

He’s been changed since the moment he first touched him at the age of thirteen and deeply reordered and refined since then. He can remember every moment together like he’s experiencing them all at once, and the feeling is so strong that he swears he can feel his heart crack.

Donghyuck is never conscious for the aftermath.

When he falls, Mark is there to catch him.

* * *

He comes to slowly, eyelashes twitching and a breath puffing out against Mark’s skin.

“Hyuck,” he murmurs against Donghyuck’s ear, his hair, brushing over his bare skin with the backs of his fingers and holding him like he’s the most treasured thing to Mark in the world. He is. Mark cannot live without him.

There’s a reason Mark only lets him do that when it’s particularly bad, but it’s… Mark’s heart always throbs in a way that’s almost painful he’s so entranced by how Donghyuck looks after it.

Mapped all over Donghyuck’s body are Mark’s brands, the deep, dark blue of his essence curling over every plane and curve of Donghyuck’s skin. The only brand competing is the blessing of the interplane, an abyssal black pattern fanning over the small of his back that’s not visible with the way Donghyuck is lying right now. He knows that the blessing of the interplane gives way easily, though, to the smooth, more simplistic designs even Mark can’t fully comprehend. Despite the fact that they’re his—undoubtably. Mark’s not a very artistic person, though, and he can only imagine that Donghyuck must have had a hand in the way the little curls and streaks were mapped out, too. Mark can’t make something so pretty on his own.

Donghyuck’s hands shift first before his eyes open properly, and then he’s looking at Mark like he’s only partially awake but quite pleased with himself. “All better?” he whispers.

“All better,” Mark hums, and grabs one of Donghyuck’s hands to press against his abdomen. Unscarred, whole. Then, “Your brands are out.” He can’t help the way his voice sounds. He’s sure he sounds sick, liking the art too much to muffle the warmth leaking into his syllables.

Donghyuck blinks at him, then looks down at his hand and the way it’s scrawled with blue. He clears his throat, lips quirking. “How indecent of me.”

Mark cannot adequately explain the intensity of emotion he feels in that moment, but it renders him a useless facsimile of himself. He doesn’t even bemoan the brands fading, because Donghyuck’s still there and he’s perfect no matter what.

“You look drunk, Mark Lee,” Donghyuck says, warmth in his tone, and Mark’s still feeling too vulnerable not to shiver at the feeling.

“You just swallowed me,” he says in defense, though weak, and Donghyuck’s laughing with his hair splayed out on the duvet, looking for all the world like an entire star system’s beauty captured in human skin. Both of them are completely clean of Mark’s blood by now—and so’s the bed. He made sure of that. They’ll have to return to the abandoned house for him to lift his blood from there, too, but for now, he doesn’t care much. He’ll worry about it in a minute.

For now, he only bends over Donghyuck’s repose and presses his lips into his.

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me your thoughts! I am... really proud of this and therefore proportionately nervous (in other words, I am more nervous than usual but will humbly accept silence). Thank you for reading ♡ 
> 
> And thank you for El, Lee, and Any for all of the encouragement ♡ It helped a lot ;;
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)  
> [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)  
> (if you have questions please ask I will be THRILLED to receive your curiosities. There is so much trivia and lore behind this piece.)


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